Products overview

A product is the record for the item — the thing you'd point at on a shelf and call by one name. A variant is a specific version of it: a particular size, colour, or other combination. A product that only comes in one form still has exactly one variant.

The variant is the unit of sale. Stock levels, order lines, sales prices, average cost and channel references all point at a variant, never at the product on its own — a product only groups the variants that are actually stocked, priced and ordered. See how the catalogue works for the full picture.

A product also carries a product type — Physical, Digital, Made to order, Gift card or Service — fixed when the product is created, and a catalogue status — Draft, Active, Archived or Discontinued — that the product and each of its variants carry independently. Archiving a product or a variant is a separate action from setting its status to Archived: archiving is Yessort's delete, while a status is just a label for your own filtering and reporting — with one exception: a variant whose status is set to Archived is excluded whenever its product is published, or re-published, to a sales channel. See product types and lifecycle for both.

Concepts

• How the catalogue works — product, variant, and why the variant is the unit everything else hangs off.
• Product types and lifecycle — the five product types, and how status works independently on products and variants.
• Options and variants — how options and their values combine into variants, and what can change after creation.
• Identifiers — SKUs and barcodes, and why barcodes sit on a unit of measure rather than the variant itself.
• Units of measure — sellable, scannable pack sizes that carry their own barcodes and sales prices.
• Sales price lists — how a selling price is chosen for a variant, and how this differs from a supplier price list.
• Bundles — a variant defined as a recipe of component variants.

How-to

• Create a product — create a product and its first variants in one operation.
• Add a variant — add a variant to an existing product.
• Add an option after creation — add a further option to a product that already has variants.
• Add a unit of measure — add a pack size to a variant and mark it purchasable.
• Add barcodes to a variant — record barcodes against a unit of measure.
• Import products and prices from CSV — bulk-import products, variants and sales prices from a file.
• Set up a sales price list — create a sales price list and add or publish prices.
• Build a bundle — define a variant as a bundle of component variants.

Reference

• Catalogue statuses — what each status actually does on a product and on a variant.
• Product types — the five product types and what the choice actually changes.
• Product and variant fields — field-by-field table of what lives on a product versus a variant.
• Sales price list rule types — the rule types that can generate sales prices, and how they behave together.